I used to believe in multiple tubes at the back of one’s throat… So that when I’d choke on some orange juice, for example, and my mom would say, “went down the wrong tube, huh?” – I thought that there were multiple tubes at the back of the throat – I thought I was choking because my OJ must’ve gone down the milk tube by mistake. I still say this these days when I inhale some Pepsi by mistake: “Whoops, must’ve gone down the milk tube.”
HAahahahahahahahahaha…good for you!
Nope, you guys are wrong: it’s pronounced “loobs” - rhymes with “boobs.”
I just remembered another one …
When Smokey the Bear would say “Only you can prevent forest fires,” I was both terrified and greatly impressed by the idea that I was solely responsible for all woodland safety in America. Being four years old, I wasn’t sure how I was going to accomplish this, but I had seen Bambi so I knew it was a high responsibility position. I was proud that my devotion to the talking cartoon inhabitants of the forest had been duly noted by Smokey, and rewarded with this assignment. Failure was not an option, because I had a vague idea that the punishment for allowing fires would involve being kidnapped by Bigfoot.
When my Dad finally cleared this up, I was miffed that I had been so cruelly stripped of my position.
I just remembered another one too:
As a child, I picked my nose a lot, and I would just wipe it all over the place hells bells. So I remember being like 6 years old, in my mom’s blue-green-grey-rust Chevy Nova, and her telling me that if I dug too deep, I would hit my eyeball string and yank my eyeball out. This conversation followed:
“My eyeball just comes out my nose like a booger!?”
“Yup.”
“Will they put it back for me!?”
“The first time they will.”
Wil it hurt?!!?
“You betcha.”
Until I was eleven, I believed this. Still picked my nose, but I did it very very carefully. I dreaded the first time, because after that I would just have to let the boogers build up.
One more: When I was like 4, we briefly lived in this rental house that had an “electrified” carpet. See, whenever you walked on the living room carpet barefoot, it would sting, so my parents told me it was electrified.
It wasn’t until I was 17 and at a family party during which every single relative got trashed that I remembered the electric carpet. I asked my aunts and my mom, and they couldn’t stop laughing. Turns out it was carpet tacks.
I thought that we had an air tube and a food tube.
-Sue
Serious mistake:
“I thought that we had an air tube and a food tube”
No, that’s not right. It was pipes, NOT tubes.
Cars don’t move; the road do. It’s all controlled by a guy using a GIANT Etch-A-Sketch.
The Moon follows you wherever you go. You know how you’re in the car and you look out at the moon and it follows you…well, that’s what I thought anyhow.
After a viewing of Gremlins I would turn on all the lights in the house, and carefully look under things to make sure those little monsters weren’t around.
I was very literal-minded like this too. I imagined that “going over the house with a fine-tooth comb” meant literally combing (with a stiff black comb) through the dust and stuff in the corners of all the rooms. I had some really interesting images in my head of all the idioms we use.
When I was in first grade, I went to visit my friend across the street. They had a fenced-in back yard. I went to the gate and asked her to come play. She said she couldn’t because she was “being grounded.”
My mom still made hamburger - GROUND beef - by buying cheap flank steaks and putting them through a meat grinder which she would attach to the counter with its huge C-clamp.
So, you guessed it…
I could not figure out what she could have done that was SO BAD that her mom would GROUND her (i.e., put her through the meat grinder) as punishment. I was very pleased when she was still there the next day.
This kinda ties in with the Favorite Monty Python Skit thread going on elsewhere but…
I used to think the Lumberjack Song (I only knew the first 2 verses) was a “real” song …
I used to believe that the Thesaurus was actually a dictionary of all the dinosaurs ever found.
You guys reminded me of another one.
Once, when I was cleaning the kitchen table with a sponge, my mother told me to use a little elbow grease. Not having the foggiest notion of what she was talking about, I dutifully proceeded to press my elbow down on the sponge and try to apply lots of pressure, trying to get the elbow grease to soak through the sponge to the surface of the table.
This was the first time in my life that someone asked me if I was retarded…
When I was about six I came home from school with a new word: “gross,” as in disgusting. I had never heard this word in any other context before. For a few days I went around at home saying that everything was gross.
My dad, who was a great joker with a very dry straight-faced delivery, informed me that, actually, these things were not “gross”, but “net”. I shouldn’t say that slimy bugs were “gross”; it was a far more proper usage to say they were “net.”
Of course I believed him. I didn’t get the joke until YEARS later.
When I was about 6 or 7, I thought you could “catch” a broken leg from someone. AFter all, people with broken legs went to hospitals; hospitals were for sick people; and sick people were contagious. Ergo, you could catch a broken leg if you spent too much time in a room with someone who had one.
I thought if you turned off the TV in the middle of a program, you could watch the rest of it any time; it would come on the next time you turned on the TV, whenever that was.
This one’s kind of embarrassing: At the same time, I really believed that TV commercials were put on with the sole intent of helpfully advising us of the existance of all these wonderful toys, products, and services.
A few more…
My dad, a huge opera fan, used to tell us about a singer named Giorgio Tozzi. My brother and I thought it was, “George Eototse”.
At the age of six I thought:
Las Vegas was a distant state
The city 110 miles south of L.A. was called “Sandy Eggo”.
This was long before the frozen waffles came out.
The colors in maps were supposed to relate in some way to the character of the areas represented.
Oh, I just thought of one. When I was like 6 or 7, I didn’t know what was meant my “part your hair”. My mom wouldn’t tell me, but she was always yelling at me to do it. I guess she didn’t believe me that I didn’t know. Anyway, one day I saw a bigger girl with her hair tucked behind her ear and then other hair pulled over the ear. I don’t know if that really describes it well, but it’s a fairly common thing to see. Anyway, I pointed her out to mom and asked “is THAT a part?” She said yes, so that’s what I started doing.
Ok, I thought of this today.
My mother always bought Scott toilet paper. Well, on the package was written “Safe for septic systems”. I seriously thought that the septic system was part of your body, like the respiratory system or the circulatory system.
For a long time, I thought maxi pads were like a diaper, so grown ups could pee and not have to raise their hand so they could go.
I thought of another one. I used to think nobody actually lived in big cities like Chicago or New York. I thought they were all office buildings where people went to work during the day, but they all went home at night to houses outside of town. After all, I lived in the suburbs, and I simply didn’t think it was possible to live in the city.